Christmas haiku #3

roads festooned
with Christmas decor
corridors of light

Another haiku for Christmas

Christmas lanterns
light up
a child's eyes

A haiku for the year's end

end of the year
time to look back and
forget

A haiku for Christmas

Christmas Day
opening presents
alone

What is a haiku?

I used to have another, older poetry blog. This was quite a long time ago. Back then, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Android phones, and so on.

I enjoyed writing haiku on a regular basis, and I also enjoyed the online conversations I had with other bloggers, usually through the comments left. That said, I noticed that people seemed to sometimes disagree quite a bit about what a haiku is.

On the one hand, you had people who would say that a haiku is a poem, written over three lines, in a 5-7-5 syllable formation. While on the other hand, some other persons would say that a haiku didn't need to adhere to that kind of structure, as long as it possessed certain qualities.

Since I'll probably be writing some haiku on this blog, I thought I'd refresh my memory a little regarding what haiku are considered to be. For a quick summary, I went over two posts in Wikipedia, namely:

• Haiku, and
• Haiku in English

Here's what I gather from those two posts:

• Haiku began as a form of Japanese poetry.
• These were traditionally written so that they possessed 17 on or "sounds."
• They traditionally had nature as their subject.
• Since then, however, Japanese haiku have evolved so that they are not required to have 17 on nor must they be about nature.
• What has remained though is the idea that haiku present two images or ideas which are separated / sliced apart through the poem's wording, or something like that.

• Moving on to English haiku, it is important to note that Japanese on are not the same as "syllables."
• For example, a Japanese word with 4 on might have only 2 syllables, while a Japanese word with 1 on might actually have 2 syllables. They're not the same thing.

• That said, many English haiku come in the form of 3 lines with 17 syllables.
• But similar to Japanese haiku, this isn't a requirement. Neither is it required for haiku to only present images of nature.
• What seems to be the case is that English haiku tend to be brief. Some persons have described these as "one breath" poems.
• And there still tends to be the structure of having two images or ideas which are compared / contrasted / separated, through the use of wording, punctuation or some other device.

So that's my understanding of haiku. They can come in 17 syllables. Or not. They can be about nature. Or something completely different. What seems to be at the core of a haiku is the contrast or comparison between two images, which are separated through some form of wording or other manner.

Let me just add though that while I really, really like the idea of having some sort of contrasted imagery in a haiku, I won't think any less of a poem if it lacks this. What I look for is some form of sudden realization or shift in viewpoint or ... something ... in a haiku, which makes me stop and think for a while, and which makes clear that the author means more than the literal imagery he or she is presenting.

So that's what a haiku is for me. Thanks for reading this.

Poetry to me

Time goes by so fast. It's something of a cliche, but it's also true. Days turn into weeks. Months turn into years. Children grow up. You turn your back for a second, and then you find that life has sprinted right by you. It's rather sad really. But that's the reality.

Even when you just focus on a single day, the number of things that need to get done means that those 24 hours can seem like a whirlwind of activity, followed by fatigue and exhaustion.

Even vacation days, strangely enough, can feel like this. Instead of being able to sit back and smell the salty sea air, you find yourself rushing from one activity to the next, from one restaurant or bar or bazaar stall to another, until night falls, you return to your room, and drift off to sleep.

There's that desire to find a way to slow down time for a bit, to allow you to catch your breath and find your head, before you plow into the next thing that needs to be done. That's what writing poetry does for me.

The great thing is that poetry doesn't need to be long. You can write stanza after stanza if you wish to, of course, but a poem isn't necessarily better because there is more of it. Instead, you have short poems that pack the emotional wallop of something longer. And you have haiku whose few lines can force you to stop and think, and maybe appreciate.

I found that by writing a short poem or haiku on a regular basis, this forced me to similarly stop and think. It made my mind go back over the previous day or other recent period of time, to see if there was something there that had captured my attention, and that maybe could be communicated through poetry.

And then there is the process of sitting in front of a blank space, choosing the words which would hopefully allow that particular meaning to come through unimpeded.

Finally, there is the satisfaction of having created something. It might not be stellar or amazing. It might just be okay or not even. But it is something that is yours. Something that your mind produced. It just makes you feel a little bit better than you were before.

So that's why this blog is here. I'll see if I can make writing poetry something more constant in my life. Given the stress and rush of day to day life, I'm sure even a few pocket moments of peace here and there would be helpful.

I hope you find something helpful for yourself on this site, or at least a little interesting. Thank you for visiting.